So I was living in San Francisco then, but the Lord, I felt like He was saying to move back to Dallas, Texas. So I did that. I’m going to church, I’m doing things that I haven’t done before, trying to follow the Lord in the way that I know how, and just very baby fresh, just a child in God. Just trying to, you know, “Okay, You want me to do that…” Just so naive and yet still prideful. Just this ridiculous mix of thinking you’re right, when you have no reason to think that you’re right about anything, but you do. And so, so I’m just in that kind of space and I feel like the Lord is finally asking me, He’s like asking me to quit smoking. And I’m like, man, okay. So I come up with a quit date. Which, I had smoked my whole adult life, even as a kid, I started smoking around like, 12 years old. Maybe I’d quit for a year here or there, whatever. But I’m 35, right? I mean, so this is, this is one of those things. I’m not just beating this because I’m making a decision to beat it. It’s not happening. You know, smokers don’t just quit and it just works out very often. You know, there are ways to quit and things like that. But for me, it wasn’t happening. 

So I feel this from the Lord and I’m like, Okay, and I picked my quit date. A couple days go by and the Lord asked me a question in my heart, I feel from Him. He’s like, “What are you going to do if you smoke after your quit date?” And I went, “Uhhhhhhh, okay.” You know how the Lord asks you a question, because you don’t know the answer, not because He needs to know the answer? And so, I realized at that moment, I’m like, Oh, man, I know – just whether it was like what they call a download or just the Lord communicating something to me – I knew a lot all of a sudden. And what was gonna happen was, I was gonna get depressed, I was gonna put it on myself, I was probably going to smoke more cigarettes to feel better about not being able to quit cigarettes, and then it was just gonna be this vicious cycle. And then as soon as I recognized that, I felt like the Lord said, “You know what? How about this? How about when you smoke, if you smoke after your date, you don’t go through that whole scenario. But you just love Me, appreciate Me, thank Me for taking it off your life and see what happens. But just don’t get upset if you fail. Just don’t, don’t even do that whole thing.” And I was like, “Okay, all right.”

You know, I went, I think the first time maybe I went an hour without smoking a cigarette, and then long story short, I went three hours, then I went a day and I went five days, then I went 10 days. I don’t even know the date I quit smoking, because I just stopped. And so with the smoking thing, and pornography and sin and all that kind of stuff that was just normal life, before I met the Lord, with all of that God showed me instead of a condemnation cycle, He showed me a grace cycle. I just didn’t condemn myself. I gave God the responsibility and the glory and He just did something impossible. I can’t, I can’t point to it and be like, “Hey, yeah, but here’s the thing that I did to turn the corner.” I didn’t do anything to turn the corner. I just let the Lord do something. I just didn’t, I just didn’t get in His way. I don’t even know how to describe how I did that exactly. I just did it. I just did the one thing that I felt like I had from Him for sure. Which is, “Don’t condemn yourself, don’t make this about you, and don’t expect your effort to produce anything.” And that’s what I did. 

I kept going and God just did something, I cannot explain it. It is supernatural. He changed feelings, affections, desires and gave me resource, like in Him, to make different decisions. How weird is that? That all of a sudden like you’ve got some kind of like other gear. I mean the machinery of Spirit that’s involved in what God’s adjusting here and there and changing, like that innerness, who knows, but whatever is going on in there, God is changing things. And when He did that, and as He did that, the reasons that I did things changed, the need for things changed. I mean, if you are intensely loved from the inside out, you don’t need to manufacture love for yourself from the outside in. So now that the Lord had come and worked this incredible, miraculous thing in my life, He was speaking to me and leading me and showing me things and educating me and building me up from the inside. 

Speaking of the inside, you know, I would try things from the outside in, whether it’d be drinking or drugs or, you know sexual sin or any of those kinds of things I tried, but none of that got inside. None of that touched anything inside of me. And that was like one of the most I think, and even it could have been subconscious, but it was like the most frustrating source of bitterness and anger. And this lost, listless, pointless, meaningless feeling that I had, was the fact that nothing that I did out here would do anything in here. But the Lord had come. It was like I had sunshine in my heart. It was coming from the inside. So like, my inner reality was completely different. There’s an answer. People have to hear about this. 

And because I’m looking for the direction that the Lord is leading me, I’m wondering, I’m consumed with this, all the time I’m consumed with this, “Okay, well, what do you want me to do next?” Kind of where we go with this thing? I don’t know exactly what to do or when. So I started to kind of learn different ways that I felt like the Lord was leading me or speaking to me. There are some circumstances that happened…So one example, like my sister gave birth to my niece, Victory, and she was eight pounds four ounces when she was born. Ever since then, I just felt strongly, 8, 8.4, 84. That is a significant number. I don’t know why, but that just feels significant. Because I felt like it was from the Lord. That this is like a number that I have between me and God. So it was almost like I’m agreeing on a language. That’s just an example of one of the ways that I felt like the Lord would highlight things to me, paths He wanted me to take. 

But also that’s not enough for me. Like, I’m kind of a knucklehead. So I need, like, one witness is not enough. Like I don’t want to be wrong. It’s a serious thing for me and a sobering thing for me, to be following God and in Scripture, it says, you know, “…in the testimony of two or three witnesses, that a thing will be established.” So I was like, you know, witnesses could be multiple things. It can be a person saying something at the time, when they have no knowledge of what I’m pondering with the Lord or am going through, and they call me. They say, “Hey, I was just praying, and you came to mind and I felt like the Lord said to tell you this, or I felt like this for you…” And it speaks exactly to what I’m going through. And maybe I even prayed and said, “Lord, would You please have someone call me and confirm what I feel like You’re saying to me?” and then that would be a witness. So that’s a witness that might not be enough for me, I might need two or three or four or five. 

As I kind of have this agreed upon language building with the Lord, and it was built through me actually acting on it. So at 8:44pm one day, I was looking at my phone, and a message came from Lifestyle Christianity University, about applying to their first Lifestyle Christianity school semester that they were going to have in Watauga. And I get confirmation from my wife, I get confirmation from this person. So I get some of these different things going for me, and I’m like, “Okay, well, I’ll just test it out and see what happens.” So I submitted an application, and I end up getting interviewed for it and then I joined the first class. This season was preparation for things that I had no idea were coming. I had no idea. 

I was actually in the foyer of Lifestyle and the campus pastor got a prophetic word for my wife, Michelle. And so she was helping him talk to somebody who really wanted to grow in the gift of prophecy. So he knew that, she knew that, and he says, “Okay, so let me show you how easy it is.” And he turned, he goes, “I’ll give Michelle a prophetic word. You know, she’ll give you one, you give me one.” And so he turns to Michelle, my wife, and he says, “You know, I see an orange and that makes me think of Florida and I hear three months. So what do you got going on in Florida in three months?” And she goes, “Uh, nothing really, I mean, I think Seth’s got some relatives there so maybe..” He goes, “Yeah see so, you know, sometimes, maybe you miss it, maybe you don’t? Who knows? Maybe we’ll see.” 

Well, Chris leaves that conversation, because my wife is connecting with this young woman, and then he comes over and immediately the person that I’m standing with, a friend of ours, Travis, he just busts out with like, “Hey, so I put you down as a reference on my application for the evangelism bootcamp.” I have no idea what this is and my heart starts to pound. I find out it’s this fast track to the mission field and it’s for crusade, a mass gospel crusade of evangelists. Of course, I’m reading Living a Life of Fire at the time by Reinhard Bonnke.There’s these other things going on and I’m just like, oh my goodness, what is this? 

Michelle finishes [her] conversation and she hears us talking about it. She comes over and somehow somebody brings up the fact that it’s in Orlando, Florida. She turns to Chris and she’s like, “You said we’d be in Florida in three months. Well, that’s when the evangelism boot camp started.” And then he’s like, “Ohhhh…” and so now there’s this swirl of, Oh my goodness! I’m immediately going through all these things that the Lord has shown me in my heart and in what I feel like my calling is all this stuff. And it all just clicks. 

So all these things had to go right. I had to hear. I had to act. And then things had to go a certain way in order for me to be able to walk this way. If any of those things hadn’t gone that way, then I’m doing something else. Like, if I don’t get the money to go, then I’m not going. Like if I heard wrong about this thing, then the next thing doesn’t happen. But they all fell into line. And so it’s just confirmation after confirmation; success is a confirmation. I don’t mean beating your head against the wall success. I mean, there’s no way I could have put this thing together success. I mean, the Lord puts something in your life. I mean, He touches somebody’s heart, who says something at the right time. I mean, all of these things, like so many things, many things every single day have to happen in order for these huge life changes to occur and in order for basically the plan that God has to take place, because this is just the beginning. He’s got incredible things ahead and I wanted to share a few of those.

We go to Christ for All Nations in the spring of 2020. A good year, a good year for new things, right? A good year for everybody. So it’s the COVID year, long story short, Christ for All Nations has what’s known as the Decapolis Initiative. So it means 10 cities, so it’s a nation-shaking strategy to do 10 crusades in a two week period and that was being set up in Kenya. I was invited to be part of that and to be a crusade director. But COVID shut the world down: problem. And if you know something about Christ for All Nations, they’re famous for, well, very well known for two things: huge gatherings of human beings and then this mass gospel proclamation. And that wasn’t something that was being allowed at that point in time. There’s a whole nations shutting down. There’s no way that a government will allow you to do this. But if you know CFAN, I mean, if you put a roadblock up against them, they’re gonna find another way around it. That’s just what they do. They’re not compromising the mission for anything. Tanzania was kept open. So we shifted. 

Everything shifts to Tanzania and of course, in the bootcamp, there are people that were missionaries in Tanzania. So there’s already connections to the men of God there. There’s already people that speak the language. I mean, it’s like, it’s this thing that the Lord has brought together and set up. So I go to one of the cities in Tanzania, Coahoma, Tanzania, to be part of the team that’s directing this crusade there. But when I was there, since I started following the Lord, I had felt like, for some reason and I didn’t know along the way, that there were different places that the Lord was highlighting. 

So I’m in Coahoma, Tanzania, and I’m going back to like, check my list. – So I would go back to look, like I kind of kept it in my head and I would see if the Lord was speaking anything about any of those places, if I felt any more drawn to them, you know, anything like that. – I was going to check my list, but all I would see was Burundi. It was like it was like, I couldn’t see my list. It was like there was something in the way and it was just Burundi. And I didn’t know anything about Burundi. 

A local woman of God asked me at one point during a gathering, during a meal, she said, “Well, what do you think you’ll do next, you know, after this crusade, after what you’re doing here in Tanzania?” I said, “Well, I think we might do something in Burundi.” And she goes, “Oh, I just got back from an international women’s conference there. I know exactly who you need to talk to. They can open up all the doors for you and make sure that everything works right.” And I went, “Okay. All right.” She was the only person that I had told, that I had said that, and I just said it because I just didn’t know what else to say. Because I just, I was like, Okay, well, I mean, clearly I don’t know what I’m doing next. But all I’m getting from the Lord is Burundi, and I don’t know anything about that. And so I just said it to that and then immediately boom, connected. Deeply. I mean, at the highest levels of governments and everything like that. So that began the Burundi journey. 

We have an amazing crusade with CFAN, with Christ for All Nations in Coahoma. Tens of thousands of people got saved. It’s so beautiful. And I go back to the United States. I’ve mentioned it to a couple friends of mine, the build-up to this thing is supernatural. I mean the way that the Lord put together the team, just everything, it was all just like that. You just open your mouth and all of a sudden everything goes your way. So a crusade director, who’s trained, he served in Dicapalis, he was a fellow bootcamp graduate of mine. He’s an incredibly talented guy, an unbelievable man of God, his name is Jim. He agrees to go. He’s just gonna go to Burundi and begin organizing this crusade meeting with our local contacts. 

We have a few meetings with them over zoom. The leadership team, myself, Jacob Ebersole, Alicia Ebersole, and Jim Weitner and then Jim’s goin’! So now Jim’s going to Burundi because something’s going to happen there. Right? Because the Lord said Burundi, now we’ve got this. So we’re just going to find out. So he heads there in the first part of 2021. Well, the world’s still shut down. In order for him to even go, he has to do a seven day quarantine. Before he can do anything. So he flies there and he’s immediately taken to a hotel where he sits for seven days. So that was the beginning of our crusade. 

People have already been trying to do this and nobody’s able to make it happen anywhere. This is our first rodeo on our own. So Jim’s in the nation now. He sets up meetings. He’s meeting with the local men of God. He’s bringing unity across denominational lines in the church. He’s doing the things that we know that we’re supposed to do. And every single day, there’s somebody that’s saying, “This is not going to work.” Even up to the last week, before August, the mayor of Bujumbura, Burundi comes to us and said, “Look, we’ve got to shut it down. There’s no way. We cannot have this crusade.” And Jim will just look at him and he’ll be like, “But it’s the Lord. But it’s the Lord.” And the mayor of Bujumbura looked at him after that, he’d be like, “You’re right, it is, we have to do it.” And he would keep this door open that should have shut. There’s no way it should happen. 

So we end up like this group of people that were just feeling like, Okay, the Lord said, “Go do that.” Okay, we’ll just go the direction that we feel like the Lord is laying out.” I’ve called it before, like, Holy Ghost kind of bread crumbs. It’s that. So it’s like this, it’s an invitation. It’s an opportunity. But do you really know? No! It takes faith. It takes a step like even now, the only reason I can tell you I know it was God is because it worked. It’s because it prospered. The thing in all of this that like, I was tested multiple times in this process and for me, I was like, You know, what worries me the most isn’t that this won’t work out. What worries me the most is that I’m not hearing from God. I was like, if this thing fails, my great tragedy isn’t that this fails, it’s that I don’t know how to hear the Lord. But all I know how to do is to do this. All I know how to do is to follow in this way, is to just do what I can. And so that’s what we did. 

We went to Burundi and we had a massive crusade. We saw over 24,000 people give their lives to Jesus Christ in this crusade. I have the pictures to prove it. I have the decision cards. I got to lay my hands on the decision cards because it’s not raised hands. The way Christ for All Nations operates is that every person that gives their life to Jesus Christ and prays to receive Him, that repents and believes the gospel, gives us their contact information and the relationships that we’ve built with the local church, which is one of the major things we do across denominational lines for the work, for the sake of the harvest and Jesus’s reward, is we gather all these decision cards. One night, we had over 6,000. Another night, there was one night where we had 70,000 people there. On the final night of the crusade. I mean, talk about supernatural! I mean, we do the best we can, but I didn’t bring 70,000 people to the field. The Lord brought 70,000 people to the field! We didn’t know if 5,000 or 500 were going to show up. Instead 50,000 came. It was just such an order of magnitude above and beyond anything that we could, that we can take credit for. 

One of the most mind blowing, amazing aspects of this whole crusade evangelism walk is that I know I didn’t do that. In the same way that the miracles that break out, because miracles break out, people get healed, the lame get up and walk the deaf hear the blind see. There’s a number of medical conditions that get healed and then people get up and testify about it. All of those kinds of things. I didn’t, WHAT?! I didn’t do anything! I didn’t heal that guy! I didn’t have anything to do with that. I see that! I didn’t cause those tears dripping down their faces. I didn’t cause the incredible emotional response to the mercy of God, to the forgiveness of God, to any of those kinds of things. You get to be a part, in the middle of this thing. 

From where I’m coming, to now, I mean, for me, it’s just – and this is probably also the mercy of God – it’s as simple as when He says to Abraham, He’s like, ‘Look, come out to the land that I’ll show you.’ Well, there’s a lot of detail missing from that scenario. It’s just come out to the place and I’m gonna take you somewhere. All right. Okay. I guess we’re going to Burundi. That’s, that’s all I got. That’s all I really know. But then it’s like thing after thing after thing. God’s got a plan. He knows at what juncture I’m going to meet Him here and He’s going to turn this in a certain direction and I’m going to meet Him there and He’s going to turn that in a certain direction. And He did that all the way through this. 

There is no testimony to the amazing crusade evangelism ability of Michael Seth to have these incredible crusades. Yes, I have incredible training from Christ for All Nations. Yes, I have this, yes, I have that, but it’s God! Like, it’s so clearly God! God cares about the lost, and He’s gonna breathe on our efforts in a supernatural way if we’ll go for Him. If we’re following, if we’re doing the things that He’s putting it on our hearts to do. I mean, He’s, He’s already got a plan. Like, the fix is in, we’ve been set up, and He continues to confound my natural mind. 

So coming from just a broken hearted, lost, unable to believe guy in San Francisco using drugs, and pretty much on the brink of suicide every day, putting myself to hazard every single day hoping, hope and really courting dangerous situations, going from that, and the Lord being able to come and just take you and bring glory to His name, and salvation to tens of thousands of people. That’s the Lord. That’s the only God I know now. He’s the only God I know. I don’t have another history with Him. I only know a God who is abundantly able to do above and beyond all that I can think or imagine and that’s been the story up to this point. 

Now, I’m actually a missionary in Africa, still planning mass gospel crusades, still doing these things. But I mean, I can tell you there’s a glorious story of how God connected me with a local missionary who’s passing her ministry on to my wife and I, to raise up these orphan kids here. We’ve adopted them. So they’re really ours now. I mean, they’re not orphans, but they were. I mean, that’s how they came in, it’s just not how they’re going out. So we’ve taken responsibility for them, and, and then there’s a primary school and secondary school, we’ve got 400 kids being educated, you’re getting a quality education that they wouldn’t have otherwise. And we’ve got a home base, to receive teams, to receive evangelists, to receive people who want to do the work of God in the nations in Africa, in Tanzania, and make a real difference and follow the Lord. I know the Lord is going to do the same thing for many people and He’s going to bring them here. He’s going to lead them the way He’s led us. 

And so now here we are; we’re in the middle of this amazing God story. Only God can write like this. I can’t write stories like this in my wildest imaginations. This is the God that has shown Himself to me. This is the Lord and this is my life following Him.